The Whippany River

A Stealth River in Morris County

Ken
Branson

All photos, except where noted by Phil Reynolds for the Passaic River
Coalition

Opening day of fishing season on the Whippany at Speedwell Dam in Morristown

If ever there was a river that expresses New Jerseyans' attitude toward
their state's natural resources, the Whippany River is it. The Whippany
rises in privacy in Mendham Township, and ends in obscurity amid a maze
of highways in the Meadows of East Hanover, Hanover, and Parsippany,
at the confluence of the Passaic, Rockaway,
and Whippany Rivers. On the way, it provides us with some pretty views
and some good fishing, and slices right through our lives. Mostly we
drive, walk, work and live near it, never knowing it's there.

The Private Source

If you look on the Hagstrom map for Morris County, you'll see a small
lake ­ labeled simply Lake ­ about a quarter mile south of
Route 24 and a few hundred yards west of Corey Lane in Mendham Township.
The lake is on private property, and there is no public access to it.
But stand on Corey Lane and you can see the Whippany, bubbling down the
hill, all of one foot wide, tumbling into a culvert and under the road.
It emerges on the other side of Corey Lane in a small, maybe three feet
across and a foot deep.

From there, the river slices across a backyard and into some reeds,
from which it flows past houses and businesses in Mendham Township. You
can't really follow the river now; the best you can do is get back on
Route 24 and head east, knowing that the river is flowing roughly alongside
the highway to your right.

Eventually, it passes under Route 24, and flows alongside you on the
left. When you get to Sunrise Lake, in Lewis Morris Park, you'll notice
a stream sluicing down out of the lake and under the highway. That stream
joins the Whippany right across the road, and right nearby is a parking
lot for the Patriot's Path.

The Patriots Path crosses the river near Mendham Road

The Patriot's Path, created to protect the Whippany River, as well as
to provide recreation, snakes through the woods and across highways and
streams all over Morris County, and is maintained by the Morris County
Parks Commission. It offers easy walking, off-road biking and horseback
riding, and is carried across the Whippany here by a wooden footbridge.
At this point, the river is about 15 feet wide and three feet deep, and
it looks as pristine as any river in New Jersey can look.

The river bends to the north here, and to catch up with it, you have
to drive east on Route 24 to Washington Valley Road. Here, you turn left,
and soon find another small parking lot for the Patriots' Path. If you
dismount here and follow the path, you climb a small wooded hill, through
thick hardwoods, and down the hill to the river. Here the river runs
in a northerly direction, and you'll be walking more or less south. If
it's early spring, and the woods aren't fully greened up, you may well
run into groups of whitetail deer, visible through the trees. The path
drops you off on Washington Valley Road, maybe a quarter mile from your
car, and you can walk back on pavement. Watch out, though. The road is
narrow and winding, but people drive on it as if they were competing
in a sports car rally. As you walk back south on Washington Valley Road,
you can see the Whippany, now 20 feet wide and running fast, disappearing
to the north under a modern, concrete bridge. Washington Valley's Gillespie
Hill Tributary -- a state "Category One" trout production stream
-- sends the Whippany River its purest water.

Danger Zone

The river flows through Morristown at Center Street

This is where the river enters its own riparian danger zone. It snakes
around the northwest corner of the Town of Morristown, enters Speedwell
Lake, and then drains the lake on the lake's eastern end. Here, the river
passes through, and drains, some of the most intensely developed watershed
in the state. It passes through Morristown, Morris Plains, Hanover and
East Hanover Townships, and sloshes through the Troy Meadows before flowing
into the Rockaway River, less than a mile upstream from where the Rockaway
flows into the Passaic.

"The difficulty with the Whippany is that the contaminants that
get into it, get flushed out very quickly and end up in the bottom of
Troy Meadows, and the Passaic River," says Ella Fillipone, executive
administrator of the Passaic River
Coalition. "It has a very fast flow. It's not a mountain stream,
but it's close."

What the Whippany carries into Troy Meadows are nutrients deposited
by human beings and their animals, then treated by any of the four sewage
treatment plants along the river. Phosphorus is a particular problem,
Fillipone says.

"You need nutrients in the water to feed the aquatic critters,
but when you have too much, you have...algae growth, and different kinds
of algae that choke out everything else," Fillipone says. "When
you see that green scum on a pond in the summer, that's algae and it
means you have nutrient overload. You need phosphorus, but you need light
and warmth, too."

Troy Meadows

The Troy Meadows are a 3,100-acre wetland in Parsippany-Troy Hills and
East Hanover Township, sandwiched between Interstate 80 and Interstate
280, and bisected by Beverwyck Road. Road maps are generally unreliable
when following rivers; the rivers disappear under clearly marked highways,
never to emerge again. However, it is possible to visit Troy Meadows.
Take Interstate 80 to exit 47 (the Route 46 exit). Turn left onto South
Beverwyck Road; drive .8 of a mile to Troy Meadow Road and turn left
onto it; drive .8 of a mile to the end of the road where there is a parking
area.

The Troy Meadows are a legacy of the last glacier to leave its mark
on New Jersey. When the last glacier retreated, a large chunk of it broke
off and sat where the Troy Meadows are now, forming a big bowl. The glacier
melted and formed a large lake, which covered much of Morris, Essex and
Passaic counties. When the water level fell, the present Troy Meadows
remained ­ a swamp for us to drive around, and for the Whippany
River to drop whatever it has picked up since leaving that lake in Mendham
Township.

Richard
Gulick, a former town planner in Randolph Township (in whose James Andrews
Park he insists the Whippany has its ultimate source), is trying to ease
the strain on the Whippany. He is the acting conservation director of
the Whippany River Watershed Action Committee, which tries to educate
people about the effect they and their waste have on the river. "We're
working with people in our watershed to try to bring information to them
so that those communities can adopt new ordinances relating to pet waste
disposal," he says. "We're also concerned about goose management."

Goose management? Yes, as anyone who has ever watched a patch of open
ground in New Jersey for very long can testify, we have a permanently
resident population of Canada geese that gets larger every year, and
whose waste ends up in the region's rivers. Excess fecal pollution from
goose droppings and pet waste caused US EPA and the New Jersey Department
of Environmental Protection to give the Whippany River the state's first
Total Maximum Daily Load -- a 58% reduction in fecal coliform. Folks
downstream in Wallington and other communities that drink water provided
by the Passaic Valley Water Authority have been warned that their drinking
water from the Passaic River contains a cancer-causing chemical that
is a by-product of the chlorination process necessitated in part by this
fecal pollution.

The
Whippany River Watershed Action Committee constructs a vegetated
buffer around the perimeter of the the East Lake at Burnham Park
in Morristown to filter pollutants (e.g., sediment, goose droppings
laden with nutrients and bacteria) from storm water before they enter
the lake. They rototilled the existing turf, placed biologs on the
shoreline, put up goose fencing to keep them out of the new plantings,
put down native wildflower and warm weather grasses seeds suitable
for a wetland area, covered the seeds with coconut fiber blankets,
pounded lawn staples into the blankets to hold them down, overseeded
on top of the blankets, placed straw on top of the seeds, and finished
the planting off with a goose netting we created by pounding masonry
lathe into the ground and stringing sisal twine around the lathing
in a diamond pattern (meant to discourage geese from landing and
eating the seeds and new, sprouting plantings).

To bring fecal pollution down, the Whippany River Watershed Action Committee
obtained state funds to establish a model goose management project in
Morristown's Burnham Park. Hundreds of community volunteers planted a
lakeside buffer to discourage geese and filter pollution before it reaches
the Whippany River. With permission from federal and state officials,
volunteers from the Humane Society of the United States have oiled eggs.
The result has been no new goslings in the park for two years.

Asked about one thing he would change about the watershed by snapping
his fingers, however, Gulick doesn't talk about geese or phosphorus.
He talks about attitudes. "I'd change people's attitudes and their
practices," he says. "I'd change their practice dealing with
how water, running off on the ground, impacts our watersheds. It might...carry
soapsuds into storm drain system. Or water running off the lawn might
carry fertilizer into storm water system, which creates a buildup of
phosphorus."

Gulick, Fillipone and their friends have a lot of work ahead of them. "We're
dealing with hundreds of thousands of families, hundreds of developers
and public officials," Gulick says.

There's Lots to See Along the Way

Here's the thing about following a river in New Jersey: It's always
disappearing below, behind, or around things. Some of these things are
on private property or otherwise not worth bothering with. But some of
these things are worth a look. The Whippany leads you to many such possibilities.

For example, the Whippany flows past the George Griswold Frelinghuysen
Arboretum. An arboretum is a sort of museum for trees and shrubs, and
this one covers 127 acres in Morris and Hanover Townships. There are
trails winding through the arboretum, and if you want to be sure of what
you're looking at, you can pick up a self-guiding trail booklet at the
information desk.

That information desk, by the way, is in the middle of a Gilded Age
elegance built as a summer home by George G. Frelinghuysen, a wealthy
patent attorney, in 1891. With the nostalgia for things rural that characterized
such projects, Frehlinghuysen called his estate Whippany Farm. The mansion
and carriage house are in colonial revival style, and the Morris County
Parks Commission, which runs the arboretum, has worked hard to keep the
warmth and spirit of the original home intact.

The river will also lead you to railroading ­ past and present. The
Whippany Railway Museum is on Route 10 in Hanover Township, just
east of I-287. You've probably seen it without knowing what it was,
catching a glimpse of brightly painted old rail cars as you made the
jughandle turn onto Whippany Road.

The museum is home to several vintage pieces of rolling stock, many
of them linked to the Pennsylvania anthracite coal industry and the iron
mining industry in New Jersey. The railroads were built, in large part,
to haul coal and iron from Pennsylvania to New York, and nearly every
river and every town in the region played an important part in that traffic.
The museum also houses elaborate model railroads, and displays several
pieces of ancillary railroad equipment, like signals and a huge water
tank.

However, unless good fortune intervenes, you may soon make that jughandle
and notice that the old trains are gone. That's because the museum's
public contributions have reached a 20-year low, and it lives on its
public contributions. According to information on its website and voicemail
message, the museum will offer its Easter Bunny Express excursion rides
on April 12, 13, and 19, and then close until the fall. Then it may,
or may not, re-open.

However, there is a real railroad on the Whippany, based in Hanover
Township. The Morristown & Erie Railroad is
descended from the tiny Whippany River Railroad, which was built in 1895
to link the Erie and Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroads. After
a shaky start, the railroad was acquired by new owners near the turn
of the century, expanded, and by 1904 had begun regular passenger and
freight service between Jersey City and Morristown. The passenger service
ended in 1929, but freight service staggered on, despite the Depression,
the shift from coal to oil for heating, and inroads of trucking. In 1977,
the line went bankrupt. In 1982, still operating, it was acquired by
its present owners -- Benjamin J. Friedland, Wesley Weis, Ed Wilczynski
and David Mandelbaum ­ who slowly began to restore it to life. Today,
the railroad switches tank cars and hauls freight for local businesses.

The River Lives!

The Whippany meets the Rockaway River

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the Whippany River (or, for
that matter, any river in New Jersey) is not that it's abused, but that
it continues to live. Consider fish. "Oh, we have fish," Ella
Fillipone says. "All kinds of fish!"

Trout, the Whippany certainly has. The New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection stocks the Whippany at several locations. The best sites,
reportedly, are just below the dams at Sunrise Lake and Speedwell Lake,
but the river's upper reaches are full of small rapids and quiet pools
where trout gather.

The Troy Meadows, where so much of the Whippany's bad news settles in,
teems with wildlife, nonetheless. The Troy Meadows' swampy areas are
a favorite habitat for wood ducks, for example. In addition, bog turtles,
relatively rare in other parts of the state, are common in Troy Meadows.
They require swampy land and a slow-moving river moving through.

In its upper reaches, the river flows through hardwood forests. In the
Troy Meadows, you can find a naturalist's candy store of tree species:
white ash, red ash, swamp white oak, black walnut, red cedar, sweetgum,
and many others.

Comments

Interested in any memories or new information about the Whippany river.

Donna Bangiola01 Apr 2015, 09:34

I want to know if you have any information about the Whippany River being
re-routed some years ago in the area of Martin Luther King Ave, at Center
St and Coal Ave.?

debbie20 Mar 2011, 18:45

Kase, we were wondering the same thing! Hopefully someone will have the
answer and get back to us! Debbie

Laura29 Oct 2009, 08:38

When I was a child in the mid fifties, we lived on a road called Academy
Drive East, in a subdivision called Academy Estates off Hanover Avenue
across from the Arboretum. The Whippany ran nearby, and we kids used to
play near it. Where is it now? I look at satellite views, and it seems to
have disappeared.

Peter Kurylko11 Sep 2009, 20:03

I have been familar with the lower section of the Whippany River for many
years. I best have know it when the Whippany Paper Company was alive. My
Grand Mother was known to call it the Smelly River then. I try to enjoy
fly fishing and would like to here of more trout being stocked in this
river. After this recent gasoline spill stocking trout would do a world of
wonders!!!

Another and seldom recognized source of pollution within Speedwell lake is
the German Carp population.\r\n\r\nPrior to the late 1950's Carp did not
exist there and tracking the water's decline can be partially traced to the
emrgence of the very large bottom feeding fish. Their feeding activities
tend to keep the silting roiled up and hence the continuous coffee colored
waters. They have destroyed the natural bottom vegitation.\r\n\r\nI do hope
that the issue of the Carp is being addressed with all of the other herd
work going into restoring this once beautiful
watershed!\r\n\r\nRespectfully,\r\nBob Chauvin

I am looking to kayak with my daughter and niece. Do I need special permit.
How can I get access to the map? Where should I start? I also live in
Whippany. I should be able to get off there. Thank you so much. Kase

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